THE BLUE BUILDING
It may have been
the oldest temporary building in the world.
Dr. Grube joked that we had to demolish it before someone proposed it as a historic site and protected it. I thought he was joking, but there may have been some truth in it. It was put there in 1967, and never named. After a few years it began to be called the 'blue building,' and finally the name was regularized as the Blue Building (no, it was not named after Silas Blue, inventor of imitation plastic, and it was NOT the box that Carruth came in). It was used for office space, classrooms, meetings, and pretty much anything else. Football star Tracy Ham took his freshman English class here, just like hundreds of other students. It stood right there while fashions changed and wars flared, while the student body increased and we became a university, while computers and hi-tech became important and the campus grew several times larger. When it was assembled, it was on a street corner with cars cruising past the lake up to where Russell Union is today. Today the road is a pedestrian walkway giving way to a construction site. The swimming pool next door has been filled in and the Builders' Wall put up, and they don't serve food in Williams Center anymore.
It's gone now, and GSU is on its way to a bigger and stranger future that the little blue building will never see. Just as students sat in its classrooms and never thought of the many years GSC played basketball in the gym that was there before, we will walk in the new library built over the blue building and soon only archives and alumni will preserve the memory of the campus' oldest temporary building.
In the days before demolition, the inside of the blue building is a sad place.
Thousands of students used this building over 37 years.
Library employee Kerry Frink gazes out at the lake from inside the doomed building.